The Mechanic & the Muse: What Balzac, Dickens et al Hath Wrought #3

Reporting

"Made in the Shade"
A package on Southern writers: profiles, interviews and an 11-state directory of writers you may never have heard of but are worth your time. Appeared in Creative Loafing chain.
"Mass Appeal"
A day-in-the-life profile of a telegenic parish priest in Miami. Published in Catholic Digest, reprinted in the St. Petersburg Times
"The Liberation of Tam Minh Pham"
How the first West Point graduate from South Vietnam disappears after the fall of Saigon, only to be rescued by his classmates two decades later. A cover story in The Washington Post Magazine

On literary devices. Continuing from "The New Journalism," by Tom Wolfe, edited by Wolfe and E.W. Johnson, New York: Harper and Row, 1973.

"The third device was the so-called “third person point of view," (emphasis added) the technique of presenting every scene to the reader through the eyes of a particular character, giving the reader the feeling of being inside the character’s mind and experiencing the emotional reality of the scene as he experiences it.

"Journalists had often used the first-person point of view—“I was there”—just as autobiographers, memoirists and novelists had. This is very limiting for the journalist, however, since he can bring the reader inside the mind of only one character—himself—a point of view that often proves irrelevant to the story and irritating to the reader. Yet how could a journalist, writing nonfiction, accurately penetrating the thoughts of another person?

"The answer proved to be marvelously simple: interview him about his thoughts and emotions along with everyone else. This is what I had done in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, what John Sack did in M and what Gay Talese did in Honor Thy Father."

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